The invention relates to a hand knitting machine comprising a transversely extended needle bed having a plurality of parallel grooves, each receiving a hooked latch needle and a carriage having cam grooves formed on the undersurface thereof and adapted to be reciprocatingly movable along said needle bed so that the needles may be engaged with the cam grooves to be reciprocatingly move in the respective grooves for forming stitches. More particularly this invention relates to a knitting machine further comprising means for detecting the relative movement between said cam carriage and said needle bed to generate a signal for controlling a computer so as to vertically lower or raise the design picture of the selected fabric to be knitted by one step, whereby the number of stitches to be formed in the next knitting operation and the positions of the stitches to be formed with different color of woolen yarn may be decided by the design picture on a display panel.
There are various hand knitting machines of various structures and arrangements, but it is common to all of them that they have at least one needle bed and the cam carriage to be relatively movable therealong so as to form one row of stitches.
Meanwhile, recently the low price of a computer to be loaded with an external memory such as a floppy disk is available for enjoying the so-called TV games by manually actuating keys on the control panel to move various elements appearing on the display unit attached with said computer or of the television set already equipped. Thus, it is possible to provide a softwear storing pictures of various knit fabrics such as sweater, gloves and the like of various designs, sizes patterns and so on to be reproduced on the display unit such as a cathode ray tube to be selected by the user of said knitting machine so as to reproduce the picture of the selected design on the CRT to which a picture of the scale showing the number of stitches in every row of stitches is to be composed and operate the computer to lower or raise said design picture below or above said scale every time one row of stitches is formed by one transverse travel of the cam carriage. It is not particularly difficult to provide such softwear or a floppy disk storing such information and operate the computer as referred to above which may make the operation of the hand knitting machine to be very easy for obtaining the desired knit fabric.
However, it is still difficult to actuate the concerned key of the computer control panel for lowering or raising the design picture step by step every movement of the cam carriage and count the number of stitches to be made on the next knitting operation.
It is, thus, an object of the invention to provide a hand knitting machine having means for detecting the relative movement of the needle bed and the cam carriage to eliminate necessity of actuation for controlling the computer to lower or raise the design picture on the display unit.
Other objects and advantages of the invention will be appreciated from the explanation on the preferred embodiments to be made in reference to the accompanying drawings.